How to get "sparkles" on ocean/lake water?

[Jason Jacobs]

Anyone know how to get "sun sparkles" on the surface of lake/ocean water. My beach resort rendering is missing this nice effect.

Thanks,
JJ

[super gnu]

make sure the vray sun (if youre using it) has a large enough radius to show up in reflections, by default its a bit small. then add a vray lens effect to sparkle up the highlights.

[Jason Jacobs]

Great! Thank you, super gnu. I'll give it a shot and post results.

[Morne]

looking forward to your results

[3ddesign]

A lot of people are disappointed with the sparkles from snow and water in photos and 3D stills for the simple reason that the "sparkle" effect in real life is a function of movement and looking through a pair of eyes (stereoscopic vision).

[joconnell]

Might be worth looking into vray lens effects for that so!

[duke2]

Render out both a specular and reflection elements at either her, or ldr with the multiplier way down so that you only get the absolute highs, and then use them to apply your flares in Photoshop or ae, using something like frischluft highlights.

[BBB3]

To the advice that's already been given, I would just add that I've found that it sometimes helped to give the water a slight reflection glossiness (something like 95 per cent) in order to spread the highlights a bit.
I haven't tried it, but Optical Flares - an Andrew Kramer flares plugin for After Effects - gives the option to add flares to parts of an image that are above a given white value (as opposed to positioning the flares by hand). You could use it and the specular pass to generate flares that are limited to the reflections in the water. It would also work for animations.

[LarsSonparsson]

You really should do that in post. I made this quick AE test using optical flares in 10 minutes.
Flare position are calculated from image brightness.

http://vimeo.com/22692654